Obligatory Introduction

Well, as everyone seems to do with their first posts, I figure I should say a bit about myself.

I’m one of the SDETs on the Expression Interactive Designer project. The areas I focus on most are Databinding and Media, but we all tend to dabble in many of the different areas. I also like to write, and I’m working on a tutorial for Databinding and Media at the moment, which will hopefully be posted to the Expression blog before too long. I’ll post a link once it’s up.

Personally, I’m 31, married, and my main interests revolve around games. I’m a board game collector with over 500 games in my collection, and I have practically every major console released since the Nintendo Entertainment System. (Yes, that includes the Sega Master). Today, I play on the XBox 360 (Gamertag: LordSaphon), PS2 and GameCube… as well as my PC, which is usually running World Of Warcraft.

So, why all the gaming knowledge? It’s to give my blog a particular flavor. Whenever I’ve gotten a new piece of technology, like ExpressionID, I try to make SOME sort of game with it. Most of my blog postings will be around the tricks and challenges I’ve found while working on things like simple game theory, user interactions, collisions, etc…

A pet project that I’ve been toying with for, well, probably 2 years or so, is a recreation of the classic “Artillery” game that nearly everyone has done or played. You have a mountain, you have a tank, your opponent has a tank. You designate your firing angle and power, and try to lob a shell over the mountain to peg your opponent.

As time has gone on, we have various competitions and things within our team, to help push the quality of ExpressionID up, and I’m almost invariably playing with tanks, mountains, and such.

Of course, I have a second goal. Although I do enjoy writing code, I’m trying to do as LITTLE of it as possible with my project. Sure, I could write an entire engine in C#, databind every pixel on the screen to some value in it, and run with that. But, I’ve been involved with many of the ExpressionID aspects that allow you to work without having to get into the code itself. THAT’s where my focus lies. How much can you do, without writing too much?

Oh, and I should warn everyone… I’m fairly verbose. Don’t expect too many of my blog posts to be short, I’m good at rambling. Of course, that’s what Blogs are for, aren’t they?

I’m also always happy to hear what folk have to say. If you see something that I didn’t explain, or you can think of a better way to do it, I’d love to hear it. Besides, I work on the project, and as the community helps ME find better ways to do things, I can communicate that information. Obviously, I’m not about to promise anything, decisions made in software are made for MANY reasons… but rest assured that as I find things I like, I’ll pass that information on as best I can.

That’s about it for now. I’m going to try to post a little nugget of the chaos that I’m working on next week, time provided of course.